


Aces Wild

by kickpuncher



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Acefic, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-10
Updated: 2012-08-10
Packaged: 2017-11-11 20:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/482543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kickpuncher/pseuds/kickpuncher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As 10.5 and Rose start getting used to the idea of sharing a lifetime together, they need to address some issues that weren't so relevant during life in the TARDIS, what with the regular explosions and the running around the whole time and so forth. In this case, why five months of relationship have gone by without a single instance of them getting to Biblically know one another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aces Wild

The sunlight streamed out over Pete’s London magnificently. Unusually for England, even a parallel England, it was a blazing hot summer day. People sipped cold drinks and donned their sunglasses, office workers ate their lunch lounging on the grass and lazily watched the undergraduates playing a giddy game of ultimate frisbee. Not too far away, children shrieked in Trafalgar Square - guarded by four huge stone swans - and splashed through the fountains, much to their parents' dismay. Birds sat in trees and sang angrily at each other. Almost all the peddle-boats were occupied by couples and families and the occasional brave soul who'd decided to manage both sets of peddles by themselves, often with limited success. Every few minutes the top level of a double-decker bus would pass by at the bottom of the hill, and the windows would flash the blinding-bright light back up again.

The Doctor - after a lot of thought and worry he'd decided to keep his name, because it _was_ still his name, after all, even if he was sharing it - wriggled his toes comfortably in the light and propped himself up on his elbows. He’d taken to wearing flip-flops during the summer, which were a lot easier to kick off every time he got an urge to sit in pools of sunlight or wade through ponds. The pool of sunlight he was currently sitting in was atop a hill in this version of Hyde Park, and was also occupied by now-emptied fish ‘n’ chips wrappings, a tartan rug, and Rose. 

She was lying out beside him, apparently quite close to falling into a peaceful doze on the rug. He glanced over at her and gave her a gentle nudge with one foot.

'Nngh,' she replied, waving him away with one hand.

'Don’t go to sleep! We’re on a date. You can’t fall asleep on a date.' He nudged her with his foot again.

'Can and will,' she replied dopily, but sat up anyway. 'Sorry. That overtime last night was a bit much. Bet you’re glad you get away with not handling the paperwork these days.'

'I think they’re glad I stopped trying,' he said, shaking his head with apparent dismay. 'I just seem to have a natural knack for doing it really, really, really wrong. Suppose we can't all be good at everything, eh? Not even me.'

'Donna would be ashamed.'

'You’re right. Best temp in Chiswick!' he exclaimed, and flopped back onto the rug. He gazed fixedly into the pleasant green foliage above them for a few moments, before sitting back up again and smiling nervously. His leg was twitching, making his toes brush against the grass. 'This date’s going well, isn’t it?'

'Er… yeah?'

'Chips and a walkabout. Picnic in the park. It’s good. A good date.'

She grinned at him bemusedly, her head lolling onto one shoulder, one eye shut against the sunlight. 

'Yes, Doctor, it's great. Well done,' she said, in the stridently positive tones of a nursery school teacher.

'You're enjoying yourself, I'm enjoying myself... Uncharacteristically nice weather...'

'Right...' She continued to grin at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop, whatever shoe it was and wherever it was going to drop.

'It's going pretty well, all things considered. Wouldn't you say?'

'Yes. And I already have said so a couple of times. What’s up with you?'

'What d’you mean? Nothing!'

'Then why are you all twitchy?'

'I’m not twitchy,' he said. His foot started to thump against the ground.

'Oh, right. And I’m the president of France. Come on, what’s going on?' she asked.

He scratched behind his ear awkwardly and didn't say anything. She laughed at him and gave him a friendly nudge in the ribs, so he took his hand away and clasped them between his knees.

'Erm. Well. Er,' he began. The frantic inner voice heard by all people about to confess something on a date was screaming _Off to a good start, Doctor! So eloquent! So expressive! You've got her on the edge of her seat, mate, well bloody done!_ He tried to shut out the screechy subconscious crescendo. 'Well... I needed to talk to you about something.'

'Ahh. So you were sweetening me up by taking me on a date?'

'Might’ve been.'

'Consider me sweetened.'

'Right. Right. Glad to hear it. Yeah. Er… All right, so. You know how, lately… You’ve sort of been… er…' He broke off for a moment, waving one hand about vaguely as he tried to summon the right words. He dismissed each option with increasing horror and embarrassment until he came to the conclusion that there were no right words, and so settled for, 'Making advances?'

She looked at him blankly.

'You know… amorous ones…?' He raised his eyebrows at her hopefully, indicating that it would be great if she said something in response so he wouldn’t have to keep crawling across the metaphorical social broken glass he was currently stretched out upon.

'Yes?' she said, her expression still carefully blank.

'Yes. Right. Well… er… You might have noticed, I haven’t been, you know… I haven't been especially... er…'

'Responsive?' she supplied, a little acidly.

'Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.'

Neither of them said anything for a little while. Their minds wandered to the last such instance of advances being made. Rose had done her best to hint that perhaps some private time in their room might be a good idea, her hand laid with pointed slowness on his arm, and the Doctor had promptly decided to read a bedtime story or eight to young Tony, and then play video games with Pete until the sun rose. Tony and Pete had been delighted - Rose less so.

To put it bluntly, she'd been extremely disgruntled about it. The evening hadn’t gone how she’d planned. Not that she’d actually _planned_ … Well, certainly not while she’d still been aboard the TARDIS. There were aspects of the Doctor and his ship that could sometimes read minds, it seemed, so she kept those particular thoughts tucked away in the more private recesses of her brain. She might have let herself get a few ideas together after the initial shock of abandoning the original Doctor had worn off. And those ideas might have embellished themselves over the past five months… Well, regardless of how deeply she had or had not planned, it wasn’t what she had expected. It definitely wasn’t what she’d wanted. 

'There’s a reason I haven’t been responsive,' the Doctor said eventually, still choosing his words with extreme caution, 'and I think it’s fair that I let you know what it is.'

'Is it someone else?'

He almost fell over. He was already sitting down, so it was an impressive feat. He spluttered with perfect incoherency for a few moments before he managed to say anything, though it came out as a strangled squeak.

' _Rose-!_ '

'No, no, I mean - you’ve had kids before, right? You said,' she clarified. 'Maybe… I dunno… You feel like you’re betraying their mum?'

'Oh. _Oh_. I see what you're getting at,' he said, trying - and failing - to disguise his relief. 'But… uh, no, no, that’s not it. We parted pretty conclusively, me and their mum. And it’s been a very long while since then. A very long while. It’s not that.'

'So, what? Is it weird that I’m a human?' she asked, completely seriously. He turned to stare at her, shocked. 'What? I noticed how reluctant you were, and you hadn’t said anything! I started getting theories together! So I thought, maybe, to you, it’s like… bestiality, yeah?'

He stared at her with his mouth hanging slightly open, completely unable to form any kind of witty - or even sensible - reply.

' _I’m_ human!' he complained loudly, ignoring the last very awkward question.

'Yeah, but you know what I mean. You’re not exactly your average earth specimen.'

'It is not that,' he said firmly. There was a slight pause as Rose’s words bounced around his mind for a while, and he screwed his face up into a horrified grimace. 'My god,' he added, 'that’s a horrible idea!'

'Well, how should I know?'

'Humans are actually considered to be very close-minded, you know,' he informed her haughtily, a bit of Donna’s temper showing through. 'In lots of respects, and sexually as well. Look at Jack! He’d -'

'- do anyone and anything?'

'Yes, exactly! Er, well, maybe not _exactly_ , but it's an example...'

'You’re giving me some seriously weird ideas of what space travel’s like now, Doctor.'

'OK, I’m not saying everyone will do anything, but people are a lot more open-minded even if they're not personally interested themselves. That’s all I’m saying. Anyway, if you’re quite finished with your wild theories, can I tell you the actual reason now or what?'

'Go for it,' she said, grinning at his indignant tone.

'I,' he declared with well-rehearsed nonchalance, 'am asexual.'

There was a pause. It became a long pause. It began to feel like the longest pause in the history of pauses until, finally, it was broken.

'Was that a joke?'

'A joke?' he repeated, stung.

'Amoebas are asexual, aren’t they? And you’re - I mean, two Doctors, split in two…' She regarded him with confusion. 'I thought that was what you were aiming at. It’s an amoeba joke, right?'

'No!' he exclaimed, now becoming offended. 'And that’s exactly what I mean about close-mindedness! It’s not just things that don’t have the facilities for sex that are asexual - if you're going to define sex that way, I mean. Anyone can be asexual!'

'Can they?' Rose asked, with even more confusion.

'Yes!'

'Oh,' she said. She considered this for a few moments, wracking her brains for an idea to get a purchase on. 'It’s like - abstaining, then, is it?'

'No,' he said again, firmly. 'I’m asexual, and that means I don’t want to have sex. It doesn’t appeal to me. I don't experience the lusty urges. I have no interest in shagging anyone or anything. Sometimes the idea outright turns me off, as it were. And that, Rose Tyler,' he said, prodding her with his elbow, 'is the most basic definition of an asexual. Nothing to do with bodily facilities or abstaining. I just don’t want to do it!'

'Why not?'

'Why not? Why not?' he repeated, with growing outrage. 'Why do you _want_ to do it?'

'Er… It’s natural, right?'

'Right. Natural. For you. And for me it’s natural not to want to. It’s just another bit of the sexual spectrum, and anyone can be in it, human or time lord or - or - vespiform. Or anyone! Including me. There, that’s quite easy to understand, isn’t it?'

There was another quite long pause.

'So… you’ve been reluctant because… you don’t want to have sex. At all.'

'Right!'

'But you’ve had kids,' she said pointedly.

'Time lords can’t go about having kids any of the varied ways that a lot of other species do. At least, we don’t. Didn’t. Well, once we could procreate naturally, then we couldn’t, and we had to use a machine.'

'A machine?'

'S’called a Loom.'

'Did you come out of a Loom?'

'I did, actually, yeah.'

'So Timelords are all asexual? No one ever said!'

'Oh, no, no! A lot of ‘em still enjoyed a bit of it now and then. They just couldn’t have kids that way.'

Rose scrubbed a hand through her hair distractedly.

'I don’t get it,' she said. 'You let me kiss you, on the beach.'

'Oh, well. Common misconception, that. An asexual is someone who doesn’t want to have sex, though how vehemently they don't want to is a case by case thing. They can enjoy just about anything else up to that point, sometimes.'

'Do you enjoy…?'

'Some things.'

She was silent for a little while longer.

'Is this all okay?' the Doctor asked, with a mixture of hesitancy and pointedness.

Well, obviously, it’s okay,' Rose replied waspishly. 'I mean, it’s not okay, and it’s not bad. It’s not anything. It just is. So I suppose - yeah, it’s okay. It’s okay because it’s a fact. Just like everything else. I don’t get to have a particular opinion on what your stance is and no one gets to have an opinion on mine. I know.'

'But it’s not what you wanted,' he translated.

'Well... I was probably rude, but that's only because I’d never heard of it before. But yeah, it - it isn’t what I wanted. And it sort of weirds me out that I’ve known you - or, er, a version of you - for a while now, and I never had any idea...'

'Well,' he said reasonably, 'I never hinted at it. I’m not good at talking about proper things, and it seemed like I couldn’t bring it up anyway without it looking like I was going ‘Oh hey by the way I see that you want to sex me, well don’t’. And that’s rude. So it’s not like you could’ve just guessed, ‘specially since you’d never -'

'This means we’ll never have kids,' she interrupted suddenly. She was staring out over Pete’s London with the shadow of a frown on her face. 

The Doctor was rubbish at bits like this, for all he liked to pretend he was cool and composed. Completely and devastatingly rubbish. He would have liked to be able to leap up and whirl her away on some amazing trip to another world as a distraction, blatantly obvious an escape though it would have been - hell, he’d even deliberately crashed the TARDIS to avoid tricky topics once or twice.

But he was human now. No TARDIS. No trips through time and space. Just Hyde Park, in the sun, with Rose. Just words.

Here and now. He was human. That was all he had.

He took a breath.

'Did you want them?' he asked quietly.

'I dunno... I never really thought about it. I had these - these little images, in my head. You know. Cute blond kids running about with me in a garden, stuff like that. All the nice bits. Just daydreams. But it’s harder than that, having a family, and I’d - I’d never properly…' She trailed off. 'I would have liked some one day. Yeah.'

'We can adopt,' he said. He cautiously eased his hand over hers - if she pulled back even slightly, he was ready to pretend he hadn’t tried. She didn’t move; he let it rest there gently. 'Loads and loads of kids need families. We’d - we’d be doing the world a favour, not adding more people to it than it’s already got.'

'Hmm.'

He joined her in looking at the view, expecting another long pause as this idea sank in for both of them. The pause was much shorter than anticipated.

'I was looking forward to it. Like… quite a lot,' she said. 

He shot her a sideways look, hoping for an indication of what the desired response was, but there wasn’t one.

'Thanks,' he hazarded. He hoped that was appropriate. Judging from the snort of laugher Rose gave, it wasn’t. 

'But we’re never going to be intimate in that way, are we?'

'Sorry,' he mumbled.

'No, don’t apologise,' she said vaguely, still thinking. 'Have you ever thought of just trying-?'

'Oh, I did. When I was much, much younger. Got kind of curious about why it's all the rage everywhere I've ever gone. Regretted it.'

'Maybe it’d be different,' she suggested hopefully. 'New new you.'

He shook his head.

'It’s not like I get up to the point of sex and then think, ‘Whoops! I don’t want to go there!’. I know before then. I just don’t want it.'

'Okay. That’s fair. Can’t say fairer than that.'

She didn’t say anything else. He took his hand away and discreetly wiped it on the grass, aware that he was starting to get both sweaty and panicky… Oh, well. He may as well bite the bullet now. If there was going to be a break-up, he should get it over with, like the responsible and mature adult he was, who had a desk job, and a mortgage.

God, he hated being a responsible and mature adult with a desk job and a mortgage.

'So… do you still want this?'

'What?'

'You know.' He gestured vaguely at the rug and greasy newspaper sheets. 'This. Us.'

She gave him a funny look. 'Why wouldn’t I want it?'

'Well - because -'

'Because we’re not gonna have sex? Um, duh, I didn’t chase you across parallel universes and see off Dalek invasion forces just so I could ravish your body,' she said, her old grin slotting back into place. She poked his chest, and he tried not to let himself burst into the relieved and insensible shrieks of laughter that were bubbling up in it. 'You’re stuck with me.'

'You sure? I mean, Cap’n Jack might be running around here somewhere. I’m sure he’d be happy to let you ravish him.'

'Maybe this universe’s Jack is asexual, too. Maybe he’s not interested.'

'I have seen a great many things,' the Doctor said solemnly, 'but I know that that is something I will never see.'

'Well, maybe if this universe has a Doctor, he’s turned the TARDIS into a den of iniquity.'

'No. No.'

'How can you be so sure?'

'I’m not sure. I’m just refusing the mental image.'

'It’ll be fine,' she said. She nudged him again. 'We’ll work it all out. ‘Cos it was all of you I wanted, not just that one bit. I can do without one bit if I get to keep the rest.'

He smiled. 'Thank you.'

He hoped the smile and the ‘thank you’ covered all the things he couldn’t say. _Thanks for accepting this_ , he thought, _thanks for understanding that this isn’t abnormal. Thanks for accepting me and not trying to redefine things to suit yourself. Thanks for not laughing when you found out I was serious. Thanks. I’m glad, if I had to be stuck anywhere, it was here, and with you._

_Thanks._

'But,' she continued, reaching over and pulling the newspaper sheets open to check for any scraps left behind, 'you have to tell my mum she’s not getting any grandkids off us.'

'Oh, that - that’s devious. That's basically blackmail, that is. A threat of the highest calibre. ‘Have sex with me or else’.'

'Nah!' she said, beaming innocently at him. 'It’s just passing the buck. Want a chip?'


End file.
